Speaks for itself…
Today was stressful when it came to placing the real grass on top of the box. Because we had made the plastic box which holds the grass water tight it was very difficult to try and line up the switches with the holes that we had left for them in the plastic.
In the end we had to remove the grass and disassemble the little plastics tubes that were there to keep the water away from the switches so that we could place the box onto of the switched with out damaging the blades of grass which are made out of the wire.
After 3 and a half hours we finally manage to get everything in place and finished.
finished electronics yesterday (mostly), sprayed the box today, grass has been growing for a while now… just got to add them together (which we feel may be harder than first thought) and hey presto!
It works, yaaaaas!
We re-made the sets of resistors for each of the switches today because we worked out that the old ones were giving too high a resistance and stoping it from working. Since re doing it we’ve got three of the mp3 players working and at least 30 blades of grass playing sound.
We also mounted speakers and started painting today. We’re rebelling against the usual PD white and grey…..Its Bright Purple.
The most exciting news this week is that we’ve bought the turf and after getting a bit carried away with ‘miracle grow’ its now looking pretty good. We’ve set it in to the plastic box with some extra compost, the only problem is that when you water it you have to be really carefull to avoid the holes becasue if water goes down them it would mean that the electronics would get wet. Obviously we’d try to change this for a final product since it would mean it couldnt go outside.
We also put silicon tips on the end of the steel wires to prevent them from fraying or being to sharp to walk on.
After finding out the best way to make our prototype work we decided on the final design, we would have 50 bladed of grass that acted like switched so when u walked across it, it would play music.
First of all we started to make the board that would hold the 50 blades of grass and for this we decided to make it out of wood so that it would be strong enough to support someone walking over it.
The next piece that we had to make was the box that was to hold the grass in place. This was by far the hardest part to make because 1 it had to hold the metal tubes in place for the grass but it also had to be complete water tight so that the water from the grass would not damage the electrics. We made this part out of acrylic plastic and then drilled the 50 holes into it needed to hold the blades in place.
To make sure it was water tight we added plastic tubing to each hole to make sure the metal pipe did not come into contact witht the water. After we had glue the plastic piping in place we used window sealent to make sure it would be water tight.
